Bring a casserole and watch me lie to the people of Hamtramck this Saturday

If you read this site with any regularity, you know my friend Steve. I’ve chatted with him here quite a few times in the past about his magazine, Stupor, and the art space he runs in Hamtramck, Public Pool. Well, he’s invited me to speak this Saturday at something called the Good Tyme Writers Buffet, and now I’ve got just a few days to come up with something clever. The subject, as he’s explained it to me, is “lies,” but I’m not quite sure what that means… whether I’m supposed to just stand there telling lies, talk about some of the many times I’ve been lied to in the past, or something else altogether. Knowing Steve, I don’t suspect it matters all that much how I approach it, but that’s what I’m puzzling over tonight…. how to talk for ten minutes about lies.

So far, I’ve had a few ideas that I think may have potential. The first idea to occur to me, I think, is probably the best. It’s also the easiest, as it just requires that I plagiarize from someone else. I know plagiarizing is wrong, and I’d never do it in my real life, but, given that we’re talking about lies, I think it’s appropriate. “How cool would it be,” I’m thinking, “if I could get my hands on what the speaker right after me is planning to deliver, and say it first?” The other thing I could do, which would be incredibly meta, would be to read from James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces”, as though it were my own work. (Frey, as you probably recall, was subject to a great deal of public condemnation when it became known that he’d fictionalized much of what he presented as fact in his bestselling autobiography.) I think that would be pretty brilliant. Significant less brilliant is my idea to recite dialogue from the Jim Carey movie Liar Liar, but I could do that as well. The down side, of course, is that it would require that I watch Liar Liar. And, I suppose, if all else fails, I could just tell a story or two about some of the more accomplished liars that I’ve met in my day.

If you’d like to see what I come up with in person, this will be going down on Saturday night at Public Pool. I believe entry is free, but everyone’s supposed to bring a dish to pass. (Please don’t lie about ingredients, as some people may have allergies.)